Enterprise business transformation and strategic alignment dependent on internal cross-functional teams, including Six Sigma teams, without competitive benchmarking data often do not think outside the box. Postponing business transformation and strategic alignment of business practices, applications, and systems until a company has missed or lost lucrative opportunities is often a huge eye-opener when the company is experiencing negative revenue growth, profitability, customer satisfaction, and loss of market share. Corporate divisions, groups, and teams across the company are often found working in separate vertical silos. This is a major inhibitor to not only teaming and cross-selling inside the company, but also is a major inhibitor to growing revenue and providing superior customers with superior customer service.
A proliferation of systems, applications, and employees typically available for performing similar data input tasks may include executive information systems, business intelligence systems, competitive intelligence systems, strategic planning systems, sales force automation (SFA) systems, lead and referral systems, marketing systems, CRM systems, intellectual capital systems, knowledge management systems and human resources systems. However, operating with such redundant business practices, applications and systems can be very costly and not responsive to employee, customer or revenue growth objectives. It is even more costly (and ultimately redundant) when multiple divisions and thousands of employees in a variety of business functions across a global corporation are purchasing the same external market data from the same vendors.
Enormous number of paper chases and fire drills take place to respond to management requests. The proliferation of business plans, strategies, as well as sales, marketing, and human resource plans that are manually input into separate systems and delivered in manual and electronic delivery manners utilizing a variety of applications, such as email, dashboards, spreadsheets, presentations and databases, leads to a loss of business and employee productivity and high costs. Information in these systems is only as good as the information put into them, and is often unreliable and seen as a mandatory reporting activity. Information in these systems is input, extracted, and viewed one record at a time, one business and one individual at a time. Prospect lists, strategies and business plans are often entered in various formats as “attachments” and become archived historical information of no use to the people who entered the information in the systems or the management team. Independent systems and applications residing in multiple business units and geographies, and high turnover of employees, are not conducive to providing the corporation with efficient corporate reporting or a “corporate memory.” Training costs associated with training current employees and new hires how to access and manually input data in these systems are astronomical.
Additionally, there is typically no way to determine how many divisions and employees are communicating with the same target company that one division may view as a prospect, another division as a current customer, another division as a competitor, another division as a partner, another division as a vendor, and corporate headquarters as a business consultant. In such situations, senior management often must be engaged to resolve internal conflicts between one or more divisions. In large corporations, hundreds of products are being developed simultaneously across the company in different divisions. Often these product development groups learn by word of mouth that they are developing similar products. Some product development divisions may in fact be competing with other divisions to get their product to market first. While competing internally for market share, they are often blind-sided by external competitors beating them to market with a similar or superior product. Without gathering critical customer-related “wants and needs” information from customers and prospects, or benchmarking pricing to insure it is not overly or under priced, product development groups may find their products are “dead on arrival.” Once again, the company may experience a huge loss in time, money and productivity.
Management looks at mergers and acquisitions as a means to grow revenue and become more competitive in the marketplace. Companies often acquire companies that are competitors with similar products and services. How and when to merge newly acquired companies, such as software companies with an existing software division that has been competing with the acquired company for many years, is not an easy task. Duplication of headcount, skills and product development is costly while undergoing this process. Human resources employees often find themselves engaged in a costly human resources system integration project to integrate employee records instead of merging employees into a single division. Instead of reducing operating costs, human resources costs rise.
Although management demands revenue growth from its sales organizations, this business area experiences the highest turnover rate of sales reps and sales managers. New sales reps and managers are given one or more prospect, customer, territory, or mailing list to work with, along with instructions to “go sell something.” Although prior reps and managers may have left some prospect and customer information in a sales force automation system, it is often old information and not useful. In some cases, prior reps and managers take the prospect and customer information with them when they leave the company. Business and personal relationships are held close to the vest, not openly shared or discussed. Newly hired sales reps and sales managers may find prospect and customer information was deleted from the system. This unfortunately means many sales reps and managers have no relationships with the prospects they are assigned. In essence, they are “cold calling” without knowledge of key influencers, buyers and decision-makers, and thus these sales reps and account managers are just shooting in the dark.
Developing proposals and responding to Requests for Proposal (RFPs) without having any relationships with the prospect or customer is often a futile and costly task. Purchasing agents may have distributed the RFP as a means to benchmark multiple suppliers' proposed solutions as a roadmap to develop the solution internally, or use RFPs as a wedge to drive down each suppliers' proposed costs. An external management consultant may have worked with the client to shape the proposal towards the management consultant's solutions, resulting in sales reps from its competition having little to no probability of gaining business with this prospect. Sales reps and account managers face another obstacle when they rely on a single-point-of-contact at prospect and customer sites to refer them into other areas of the account. Growing the account horizontally is a long slow process, particularly if the customer single-point-of-contact is a manager or purchasing agent and the decision-maker, buyer or influencer is held at arms' length. Account managers often learn too late that competitors have better relationships with the account manager's account than the account manager. Without knowledge that relationships and shared datasets exist between the account manager's employers, customers, competitors, prospects, partners, vendors, business consultants, executives, employees and individuals, it's only a matter of time the account will be lost to a competitor with better and more fully developed connections.
Human resources (HR) managers and executive recruiters face further system and application obstacles. Employee resumes and biographies gained by one division are often not shared with another. Instead, resumes are placed in an archive database. HR managers and executive recruiters seeking executives, employees and/or skills are limited to searching one or more systems one record at a time, or are limited to extracting a list of records in the system and must review each record one at a time. Succession planning may be based on internal personal and business relationships instead of selecting employees based on experience and required skill sets. If employees, resumes, or skill sets are needed to fill roles in a newly formed business unit, human resources often looks outside the company for skills that it may have internally in many divisions across the corporation, but has no current way to know people and skills are already available internally. Moreover, locating resumes and skills of current employees is often a futile task. Job seekers face similar “single record” access and viewing obstacles with job search websites and corporate websites.